FOOD & WINE
Eating and Drinking in the Cinque Terre
The food of the Cinque Terre is Ligurian and specific: hand-pounded pesto, salt-cured Monterosso anchovies, and sciacchetrà, the sweet wine of the terraces.
Check dates and availability ↗The pesto really does start here
Pesto is not a Cinque Terre invention so much as a Ligurian one, and this is Liguria, so you are eating it close to the source. The traditional version is basil, garlic, pine nuts, a mix of Parmigiano and aged Pecorino, and Ligurian olive oil, pounded in a marble mortar with a wooden pestle rather than blitzed in a blender — which is where the name comes from. It usually arrives on trofie or trenette, sometimes with slices of potato and green beans cooked into the same pot, a combination that looks odd on the plate and makes complete sense once you taste it. It is a mountain-and-sea dish from a place that has always had more herbs than flat farmland.
The salted anchovies of Monterosso
Monterosso is anchovy country, and the salted anchovy here is treated with the seriousness other places reserve for cheese or ham. Boats have worked these waters for the small silver fish for generations, and the classic preparation is to layer them in salt and let time do the rest, so that what you get is dense, savoury and nothing like the tinned version most people picture. You will also find them fresh — fried in a light batter, or marinated raw in lemon juice until they turn opaque and bright. If you eat one thing in Monterosso that you cannot get as well elsewhere on the coast, make it the anchovies, ideally with a glass of the local white.
Sciacchetrà, the wine worth the terraces
Sciacchetrà is the wine the terraces were arguably built for: a sweet passito made from grapes left to dry after harvest so the sugars concentrate, then pressed for a small, intense amber wine. Production is tiny — these are hand-tended vines on slopes too steep for machinery — so it has always been precious, poured at the end of a meal rather than through it, often with a hard biscuit to dip. Expect it to cost more than an ordinary dessert wine; that price is the labour of the cliffs in a glass. Bottles vary a great deal between makers and years, so if a small producer or an enoteca offers a taste before you buy, take it.
The dry white you drink with lunch
The everyday wine of the coast is the dry Cinque Terre white, made mostly from local grapes such as Bosco, Albarola and Vermentino grown on the same terraces. At its best it is crisp, faintly saline and built for exactly what you will be eating — anchovies, seafood, pesto, focaccia — rather than for contemplation. Quality ranges widely, because farming these slopes is hard and not every bottle is estate-grown with care, so a house white in a busy harbour-front spot is a different thing from a small grower's. If you can, buy from an enoteca or a producer who works the terraces themselves; you are also, in a small way, paying to keep those walls standing.
Focaccia, farinata and the cheap good things
Some of the best eating here is the least expensive. Ligurian focaccia — dimpled, oily, salty, sometimes scattered with onion or olives — is a morning and mid-afternoon staple, and a warm square of it eaten walking is a legitimate lunch. Farinata, a thin savoury pancake of chickpea flour baked until the edges crisp, is the region's great street snack and turns up wherever there is a wood oven. Neither is fussy and both travel well onto a train or a trailhead. For a place this famous, it is worth remembering that you do not need a sit-down harbour table to eat well; a bakery counter and a paper bag will often do it, and cost a fraction as much.
Lemons, and the sweet end
Liguria's coast is a citrus one, and Monterosso in particular is known for its lemons — big, fragrant, celebrated with their own festival in early summer. That fondness shows up all over the menu at the end of a meal: limoncino, the local lemon liqueur, served cold and small; lemon cake; a lemon granita on a hot afternoon that does more to fix you than any espresso. It is a gentle way to close a lunch you probably lingered over. None of this is haute cuisine, and that is rather the point — the food of the Cinque Terre is the food of a hard-working coast, generous, seasonal and best eaten without ceremony while looking at the water.